Tom Oliphant on the Hugh Hewitt show (inside the mind of the left) (long piece)

Spread this one far and wide, folks. Tom is not a rabid twit of a lefty, using Hugh's new definition. He's wrong, but he's not insane. This is the view of the left in America today. Go forth and dissect:

HH: For a different take, now, on the war against terror, joined by Tom Oliphant, who is a columnist for the Boston Globe. Long time columnist there, as well as a frequent participant on the PBS News Hour. Yesterday, a guest on Air America. Today, a guest on Hugh Hewitt. Tom, you've covered the waterfront of talk radio in two days.

HH: You're pretty tired. You've run the lap. Thank you for making some time for us. I listened to the Air America interview yesterday with great interest. And at the end of it, you said that the idea that we're making progress in the War on Terror is bunkem. Why do you say that?

TO: Well, you know, 9/11 often gets compared, with good reason, to Pearl Harbor. A combination of hideous sneak attack and wake-up call. It certainly was that. What ought to trouble more Americans, however, is that at the same distance from Pearl Harbor, in the 1940's, we had won the war. We're involved in a much more difficult, longer-term struggle now. But it is very hard to see the gains. In the four years, almost, since 9/11, there has been at least one major Al Qaeda-connected or inspired event per year. The hideous nightclub bombing in Bali, the attack on the resort in Kenya, Madrid, and now London, before we count casualties in Iraq and from somewhat smaller incidents around the world. The willingness of terrorists to do this sort of thing, does not appear yet to have been matched by our ability to defeat them, or to defuse the broader problems out of which terrorism emerges.

HH: Now, of course, it's a good thing that the United States has not been attacked. That's progress, correct?

TO: Could I try and divide your point in half, and agree completely with the first point. Of course it's a good thing that the U.S. hasn't been attacked. And at least a few incidents, some of which, for good reason, we haven't heard about, it's because of the actions of our government. But I'm not sure that that's progress, because if you see the war against terror as President Bush originally defined it, international, you're either with us in this thing or you're not, and we have a willingness to fight it anywhere we find it, in order to reduce the danger to our own country, that's where I have a little trouble seeing major progress.

HH: Let me throw a couple more at you. The camps in Afghanistan are no longer training jihadists by the tens of thousands, correct? It's good they're gone, right?

HH: Is it a good thing that Libya has given up its nuclear ambitions, and turned over their chemical and biological facilities and arsenals to us.

TO: Hugh, you're talking to somebody who would go even further than that. Again, it's great, and I have written that so much progress has been made with Libya, as a result of a process going back, by the way, several years, that it's ridiculous that Libya continues to be officially listed as a terrorist supporting nation.

TO: Huge wins, but let me try to balance that, to get people to think more. I think...I don't think, I know from talking to American officials, that it is an operating assumption, though not one talked about very much, that on 9/11 itself, the leadership, if you want to call if that, of Al Qaeda, that was based in Afghanistan, realized instantly that not only had everything changed for the developed world, everything had changed for them, too. That we were going to come after them, that some kind of invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was inevitable, that life as they had known it would cease to exist also. And I just think that in the years since, terrorists have done as good, and sometimes a better job of adapting than we have.

HH: Again, I just look at body totals. I look at very simple things in a rather sort of plain fashion of saying how many people are they killing, and where are they nesting, and how many refuges have been denied them? And now I want to come to the hardest nut of all. Do you think it's a good thing that Saddam has been removed from power?

TO: Oh, I think it's absolutely fantastic, and was one of those weird people who supported the invasion, even though I was a skeptic from the beginning, about unconventional weapons on Iraqi soil. What a tiny minority of us objected to, was such a poorly planned, and carried out, invasion and then occupation.

HH: Well, we can disagree on that, but that's a different thing, because when you talked to Franken yesterday, what I was really surprised by, was your comment that we don't know what motivated the killers in London yesterday. Was it...and you speculated that it might have been the invasion of Iraq. Do you think...

TO: No, my lack of knowledge doesn't go to motivation, so much, which after all, until we know who they are, we don't know anything about motivation. And in terms of defending our country and our interests, I frankly don't care that much about another person's motivation if he's trying to kill me. I'm much more interested in stopping him.

HH: But yesterday, you said were they inspired by the American occupation in Iraq, the Middle East...

TO: Yea, that question is one that has perplexed American officials at the highest levels, in the last 36 hours, and I'll tell you why. You will notice that there is a new phrase in the bureaucratic language about terrorism. We used to use Al Qaeda routinely to cover just about everything. Now, there's a difference between what we call Al Qaeda-connected, and Al Qaeda-inspired. And it's the latter that troubles American officials, who operate in counter-terrorism situations, and it ought to trouble all Americans in my view.

HH: Well, it should. You know, Lawrence Wright wrote this magnificent piece. Have you read it in the New Yorker?

HH: And the Madrid cell, of course, was Al Qaeda, but it was never directly connected to Al Qaeda. And as Paul Wolfowitz once said in a lecture I attended, they don't have membership cards. But do you really think that that bombing would not have happened yesterday...is there a chance in your mind, that it wouldn't have happened yesterday, had we not invaded Iraq?

TO: Well, because the...I don't want to bore anybody with a long history of Al Qaeda's emergence, along with bin Laden and Al Zahawi. But this kind of terrorism grew out of at least two or three strains. One of them was the fight against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which trained a lot of rather radical people in the instruments of guerilla warfare and then terrorism. The American military presence in the Middle East, during and following the first Persian Gulf War, is another strain.

HH: I do want to, though, truncate the history, since this audience knows the history of Al Qaeda very, very well, to how you think the War in Iraq could possibly have made terrorism, international terrorism worse.

TO: Well, what's new about what we continue to call Al Qaeda, and I'll accept it if you view it as a kind of loose federation or umbrella source of inspiration. What troubles American officials that I talk to, is the emergence, the steady emergence, of new recruits. Now, they're coming for a variety of reasons, from a variety of places, for a variety of reasons. I think those most motivated by the U.S. occupation of Iraq, are trying to go to Iraq. But it's not by any means, the sole reason that people who are operating in this area, are discovering. Some of them are familiar reasons. The continued stalemate between the Palestinians and the Israelis, the American military presence, not just in Iraq, but more broadly in the region. But what ought to be troubling all of us, regardless of the reason, is that this new kind of Al Qaeda-inspired terrorism is occurring. Madrid may be my favorite example for the moment.

HH: The thing that my friend Lileks likes to point out, and Mark Steyn likes to point out, is let's give them credit for what they say. And when Osama writes, or Zarqawi orates, they say they are driven by a vision of Islam, which is their duty, that it's not dependent on us. It goes back to the exile of the Moors from Spain, that they are on a jihad that has very little to do with what we do or don't do, whether we go to Iraq or don't go to Iraq. They're killers, Tom. And they're going to kill us unless we kill them first.

TO: Well, yes, but that clearly doesn't explain either the people we are looking for, or the people we already have in captivity.

HH: Well, now, let's debate that. What about the shoe bomber? That clearly explains the shoe bomber who was going to blow up our plane before we ever, you know, looked the wrong way at Iraq.

TO: Well, as I said, there are threads out of which Al Qaeda emerged in the early 1990's, or possibly even the late 80's, that have absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. But there are some that do. And what bothers me, just as an American, forget lefty for a minute, is that there appears to be a continuing stream of recruits in international terrorism. And what troubles me specifically about the bombings in London yesterday, is that despite the evidence of considerable planning and coordination, possibly even movement across international borders, neither British MI5, nor the American intelligence community, after nearly four years, appears to have picked any sign of it. And that means, to me, that we are in danger of falling behind in the intelligence game...

HH: But Tom, we've heard Blair and Bush, completely independent, say it's a matter of time. It's inevitable. Rumsfeld, it's inevitable we will be hit again. Sort of like you give the flu vaccine to a million people. A number of them are still going to die of the flu. The idea is that we are defending forward, and you know the roach motel is set up in Iraq, and the roaches are going there, and there may be a few, marginally few more recruits, but the dangers that Saddam posed by being a state sponsor, just as the Taliban was a state sponsor, are just too...far too greater than to allow them to go on that way.

TO: Well again, possibly...maybe the problem we have here is apples and oranges. When Al Qaeda was in Afghanistan, that was one set of facts. There appear to have been, at least according to the American intelligence community, something like 50,000 plus people who in some way, went through the training facilities there, and scattered around the world. Well since that time, there has been roughly an equal number of people who have begun forming cells that are more inspired by Al Qaeda, than connected to it. And that's why I think what happened in Madrid, and in London yesterday, is especially troubling. Because you mentioned body counts at the beginning of our conversation. And to me, it's as horrible if five hundred people die in ten incidents over the next six months, as it is if five hundred people die by happenstance in one incident.

HH: Tom, let me give you a theory here. The west, maybe we can agree on this. The west slept through the early viral years of Islamist fanaticism.

HH: And as a result, it went from a few bands of isolated jihadists, to a worldwide movement, headquarter's Kabul. And it got followers throughout western Europe, and it had followers throughout the Middle East, and we slept through the transfer in Palestine of a secular political movement that was vicious and violent, into one that had a religious inspired counterpart in Hamas. And that that went viral on us as well. And then after 9/11, we woke up collectively. Forget the partisanship. And now the question is what do we do when it's gone viral around world? And what I am distressed by, is that the left seems more interested in bleeding Bush than in killing terrorists.

TO: Well, on that last point, Hugh, I represent a minority that would agree with you. I think every sentence spent on President Bush is wasted breath. And it doesn't unite the country, but much more importantly, it doesn't solve the problem. And what I wish my friends on the left would do more of, is talk about the present and the future in very specific ways, designed to get this right. A classic example is in intelligence. I believe that something is not quite right, nearly four years after 9/11, and that we all need, regardless of party, to examine this structure that's emerged in the last few years, much more carefully, to understand better why it is not really working yet.

HH: But now, they had the 9/11 Commission, and we had the Intelligence Commission, and all but one of their recommendations have been adopted, so we'll see about that.

TO: That's true of the latter, but not of the former. I believe the batting average of the 9/11 Commission is slightly under 50% at this point.

TO: Well, actually, the way I read the statute that was actually enacted, I think there were so many fudges and compromises, that the typical senior U.S. intelligence official is still pretty confused about the bureaucratic relationships.

HH: All right. I want to play something for you, because I think this gets to the heart of the problem. This is an exchange between Ron Reagan and Christopher Hitchens, partial, earlier today. I want to talk to you about it as soon as you hear it.

CH: Do you know nothing about the subject at all? Do you wonder how Mr. Zarqawi got there under the rule of Saddam Hussein? Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal?

CH: Have you ever heard of Abu Nidal, the most wanted man in the world, who was sheltered in Baghdad? The man who pushed Leon Klinghoffer off the boat, was sheltered by Saddam Hussein. The man who blew up the World Trade Center in 1993 was sheltered by Saddam Hussein, and you have the nerve to say that terrorism is caused by resisting it? And by deposing governments that endorse it? ... At this stage, after what happened in London yesterday?...

CH: Excuse me. When I went to interview Abu Nidal, then the most wanted terrorist in the world, in Baghdad, he was operating out of an Iraqi government office. He was an arm of the Iraqi State, while being the most wanted man in the world. The same is true of the shelter and safe house offered by the Iraqi government, to the murderers of Leon Klinghoffer, and to Mr. Yassin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. How can you know so little about this, and be occupying a chair at the time that you do?

HH: Tom Oliphant, my point in playing that is...Ron Reagan's a twit. I don't expect you to defend him or attack him or anything like that. I just...I am confused by the left's refusal to look the problem in the eye, which is that there are literally hundreds of thousands, if not millions of jihadists who would kill us if they could. And it leads to this questions. If the folks in London yesterday, the killers, not folks, had had weapons of mass destruction, would they have used them?

TO: My assumption is that the weapon of choice was high explosives with low poundage.

HH: But if they had had, for example, radioactive material with which to make a dirty bomb or a biological agent like anthrax, do you think they would have used them in the course of doing this?

TO: Not necessarily, because what we're not understanding is the choices that are being made inside terrorist cells today. I understand theories and generalizations. But I think when the rubber meets the road, you're encountering real terrorists with very specific plans. There's no question in my mind that you're right, that many of the people involved in international terrorism would gladly used a weapon of mass destruction if they had one at their fingertips. What ought to disturb us, because it is going on right now, it that there appears to be a trend toward the selection of soft targets, and the acceptance of casualties, forty, fifty, is a major event to them now. And if this trend gets further established, the loss of life is going to be substantial over time.

HH: Tom, time out. There is a difference between 3,000 in the World Trade Center and yes, the fifty yesterday. And the fact is...

TO: But Hugh, that's not my point. My point is that if yesterday is replicated ten times over the next six months, the numbers eventually add up.

HH: But it will still be five hundred, not three thousand. My point is, and it's the one I never see the left confront, they will kill millions if they can. They will take a nuke to New York if they can. Doesn't that mean we have to take the action necessary to cut off the possibility of that?

TO: But again, I am focused, as I say, I recognize that politically, I'm a minority in my own world, just as some of my friends on the right are a minority in theirs.

HH: But Tom, it's not about you. It's not about me. It's about what does the country do?

TO: It's called solve the problem instead of politicizing it. This is why on the left, our contribution right now could be to forget about terms like Bush and the Republican Party, and concentrate on making concrete suggestions to get it right, both in terms of fighting terrorism and fighting in Iraq.

HH: When we come back, I want the Tom Oliphant concrete steps on killing the beast. How do we kill this beast. I want the real concrete...do we go into Syria? Do we go after the nuclear Iranian facilities? What do we do, Tom Oliphant, because it's not enough to say we've got to get serious. I want to know what the left thinks we ought to do, and you're a great spokesperson for it.

HH: Tom, I want to thank you a) for coming and staying. I hope you come back. I hope you found it congenial, if tough and blunt. And now, you've got Rumsfeld and Bush in a room. You've got two and a half minutes to tell them exactly what they should do, concrete steps. Take it away, Tom Oliphant.

TO: Okay. In addition to this fresh examination of the adequacy of our intelligence efforts in the wake of Madrid and London, I think, short-term, the most important thing is to get Iraq right. I think we have to confront the possibility that we do not have forces adequate to do the job. We may need to go to NATO, the plans exist by the way, to deploy a force of a few thousand, maybe up to five thousand, along the Syrian border, to begin dealing with infiltration systematically. I think we have to rethink our approach to reconstruction, so that we emphasize labor-intensive projects, that can reduce unemployement that is way too high in a broken country. But above all, we need to listen to the people on the ground, who in contrast to the administration, describe our force structure as inadequate to maintain security over the critical next year during which the political institutions in Iraq may or may not be able to emerge. Success in Iraq, getting it right, in my view, would have an immediate effect, though not a completely solving effect, on the wave of international terrorism that I think is threatening to get out of hand.

HH: Rumsfeld speaks up. He says what about Iran? What do we do about their nukes?

TO: We do not have the military to invade Iran or North Korea. I still believe that even with the change in government in Iran, it is possible, behind...if we did ti with Libya, we can do it with anybody.

TO: I don't think we're at that point, because I don't think their nuclear development is at that point, either.

HH: Rumsfeld says it is, and he can prove it to you, and accept it for the moment. Do we bomb them?

HH: But just accept it for the purposes of the argument. If I could prove it to you, that they're there, or they're a week away. Do we bomb them?

TO: No, because I don't believe that we're organized or we've thought through what we'd do the day after the bombing. And what we've learned in the last few years, is we haven't thought through enough this question of what we'd do the day after we satisfy our impulses.

HH: Tom, I wish you would...oh...satisfy our impulses...We're out of time, Tom. I won't...you've been such a good guest. I hope you come back. We'll get in touch with you about that.

HH: It was a great pleasure. Satisfy our impulses?!? Ugh. It's something like that that just kills me, but I'll talk with the audience about it.

I don't have to read it---I am listening to it right now, on delay in the Fort Worth area...

Unfortunately, I can't stand to even listen to Oliphant, because when I do, I picture what he looks like talking.

Has there EVER been a gayer looking man when he talks than Oliphant? (Not counting actors and people that are TRYING to act gay on purpose, of course.)

Can't figure out whether Oliphant wants us to kill all the Jews (so we are no longer offending the Islamofascists), or simply kill all the Middle Easterners (because we can't tell the Islamofascists from the Sufi).

He's always been strange that way.

What ought to trouble more Americans, however, is that at the same distance from Pearl Harbor, in the 1940's, we had won the war.

Is Oliphant advocating dropping nukes on Baghdad and Fallujah?

He may be advocating dropping nukes all over the place. Oliphant is a strange dude. He's one of the Western Liberal fanatics "W" is protecting the Moslem world from.

"W" has but to say the word and people like Oliphant are going to turn the Middle East into a glass parking lot Fur Shur.

What ought to trouble more Americans, however, is that at the same distance from Pearl Harbor, in the 1940's, we had won the war.

What troubles liberals is at that stage of WWII we had lost hundreds of thousands of American lives, and at the same distance in the WOT we have lost about 2000, that's less than the original attack, which I think can be laid at the door of the 'let's indict the terrorists' liberals

Is Oliphant advocating dropping nukes on Baghdad and Fallujah?

He isn't advocating anything. Oliphant has no ideas to advocate -- other than the assertion that somehow, in some undefined way, Bush and the Republicans are doing it "all wrong".

John Kerry, presumably, would've done it "properly". He had "a plan" remember, but neither we nor Oliphant have any idea what it might have been.

Interestingly, though, Hewitt got him to agree that success in Iraq was key to the future on the War on Terror. Which puts Oliphant in complete strategic agreement with Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and all us slow-witted "neo-cons"...

If Oliphant is representative of the creme de la creme of the left's critical thinkers, it is a demonstrably slow track.

That last bit.."the day after we satisfy our impulses"

That says so very much about the lefts view of the military and its use. They believe that the use of the military is a brutish, barbaric impules, used to satisfy ugly bloodlust. Never once thinking that it might be justified in the protection of our nation or its intrests.

These are the same people that would try to negotiat with Tamerlane, the Nazis or cannibals. Until they grow up they can never be allowed near power again.

Oliphant took a totally different tone than he did in the Al Franken interview.

He's a commie - his motto is "truth is that which serves the revolution."

The problem is that too many idiots are thinking this is some kind of gentlemanly return to the Cold War, when our enemies are thinking World War III.

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